Land-escapes
We’re all familiar with landscapes as a genre of art, which feature the natural landforms of a region. When looking at a landscape, everything is out in the open; a viewer can breathe in the scene and appreciate the stability of an almost unchanging environment. What we’re calling land-escapes mean something entirely different. These artworks depict domestic or everyday activities and portray some individual escaping from the collective problems unfolding in the world. Hugh Pearce Botts’ Practicing and Bernard P. Schardt’s Girl Sewing appear to be simple domestic scenes at first, but when we think of the circumstances in which they were created, they take on a deeper meaning. At a time when the Great Depression had left many people jobless and anxious about the future, individuals were focused upon the basics--like finding ways to feed their families. Sometimes they coped through community support or political solidarity, the more public face of the New Deal. But just as often people found ways to cope in solitude, using ordinary routines as a form of escape—much like people enjoy their “me time” today.
Interpreting a work of land-escape art implies landforms that we can’t see, following a person’s gaze to a place that’s not the physical setting—which we still must describe carefully. In Botts’ lithograph, an umbrella of light is the closest visual analogue to the musical and imaginative space where the woman “is.” Her concentrated expression as she plays the piano reveals something just as real as the anguish and distress shown in Ronay’s The Life Boat. People respond to trauma in different ways, through different emotions, habits, and actions. For the woman at a piano, her escape may lie in a daily practice she clings to in isolation. In Schardt’s colored woodcut we see the same close concentration, focused upon a piece of fabric guided through a sewing machine. It’s not clear whether her work arises from economic necessity or me time; however, its colorful pattern has suffused the surrounding room, which is a patchwork of textured blocks. In contrast to black-and-white deprivation, we’re inside of another world. Domestic terrains weren’t separate from the public history and representations of 1930s America. During the next decade, Americans would speak of the “thousand-yard stare” to describe traumatized World War II combatants, even after veterans had returned to their homes. Land-escapes reveal the contradictory states of living through a far-reaching social crisis.
Works Consulted
-- Doss, Erika, and Mary Okin. “Editors’ Note: Confronting the Legacy of New Deal Art in the Twenty-First Century.” American Art 39.1 (2025): 2-5. Link
-- “Landscape.” The Museum of Modern Art. Link